Author: White Whale

To save our democracy–perhaps, to RECREATE our Republic as a representational democracy–these are the sorts of steps needed:

–Eradicate the Federal Reserve, and go back to a gold standard. What I believe would be best is if each State issued its own currency, based on physical gold reserves, but that part is still evolving.

–Eradicate Social Security completely, stop taking out taxes, and let people provide for their own retirements. I would anticipate this will mean in part locally funded, charitable homes for the elderly, for those who would otherwise go hungry.

–End Medicare. Let the States choose how to provide the elderly with medical care. My vote would be to create a tax incentive for private insurance companies to add a rider to all healthcare policies that if you, in effect, preinvest in your old age by paying some additional amount, that you will never be cancelled.

–Make Medicaid a fully State run program, and let the individual States decide how much they want to provide.

–Self evidently, reverse Obamacare, which will add to costs, increase the role of government, and do NOTHING–NOTHING–to improve our health as a nation. It will in fact DECREASE access to healthcare.

–Downsize our military considerably. We have now, and have had for many years, the ability to project force anywhere in the world within an hour, in the form of ballistic nuclear missiles. We need, simply, to announce that any nation from which terror attacks originate, will be help accountable. Period. No excuses. Then draw down our troops. Keep the Marines as a rapid response force, and limit the Navy to say a 1,000 mile perimeter of the US. Continue developing cutting edge technology, so that the Air Force always has the best stuff, and obviously keep the Coast Guard active. Most of the Army can be eliminated. We can leave Korea. If the North invades, it disappears in a pile of radioactive ash.

–Build a fence with Mexico. Increase the penalties for being here illegally considerably. Maybe we copy their policy of a two year jail term. Or we allow first time offenders to simply be deported, and second time offenders get FOUR years.

–Pay off our debt, then reduce Federal taxes considerably.

–We need to regain the proper balance of power between the States and the Federal Government. The principle means of disrupting that balance has been the Supreme Court. What we need is a Constitutional Amendment by means of which patently unConstitutional rulings by the Court, such as Roe v. Wade, can overturned.

To be clear, CONGRESS did not ban abortion. That was not a right granted to it by the Constitution. How much less, then, was that right granted to judges for life, who are appointed?

–We need to eradicate most other Federal departments as well, including Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development (including, obviously, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who have done so much damage). We need a Treasury Department, a State Department, and a Department of Defense.

At some point, I will run the numbers. I suspect that if we do all of this that we can pay our bills off, restore our democracy, and better enjoy the intended fruits of liberty.

Until then, we need to accept that we will undergo a period of relative poverty. Our system, to some extent, is going to crash. Our bills are coming due. Elderly parents will live with their children; children will stay at home for long periods of time. Homes will be built no one lives in, and our assumption that we can have anything we want any time will come to an end. We will have to learn to satisfy ourselves with simpler things, and that is not such a bad outcome.

Net, net: there is no reason to believe we cannot survive and, in the end, prevail against the problems we face. Step one, though, is to stop digging the hole. That will quite literally take an act of Congress.

In a shooting war, people who make things that go bang make profits. This makes some people think that the people who make things that go bang are behind our wars. It’s hard to say if this has any merit, but it seems clear that is not the full story. Nothing in life is that simple.

What I would like to suggest, though, is that there is a group of people–the same people, the money people we normally don’t think about–who make money in so-called Wars on Poverty. In both cases, money is borrowed. We pay interest on money.

Right now, some $400 billion is siphoned out of our pool of wealth annually, in the form of interest on our debt. That exceeds the amount we spent annually at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This happens year in, year out.

As long as money is being borrowed, the richest people out there will continue to get richer. Boeing and Halliburton are small fry, and the Left in particular needs to figure that out.

On that note, we should think of most socialists as sentimentalists given credit cards to help save the world. That is literally the case with most of them. If you like, you can add “war-mongers” given the same credit cards to go fight the enemies of democracy.

Both of them are bankrupting us.

The dangers we face are Mercantilism–which is the protection of private profit by the police power of the State–and Socialism, which is a moral abyss in which a tyrannical central government seeks to eliminate all wealth and difference in the name of “justice”.

At times, it seems, they pursue one another. Why else do Mercantilists–Wall Street bankers, to be clear, who had a money trust passed into law in 1913–support people like Barack Obama? In the final analysis, as long as they have the money, they call the shots, so it doesn’t really matter who is in power. Yet, for the socialists, the mercantilists pay for their projects. They get people addicted to the crack of easy money, then get them to sell their souls for support. The socialists think they are helping the country, so they go along.

The Golden Rule of this Earth is who has the gold, makes the rules. One can buy comfort for free, in the short run, just as Esau peddled away his birthright for some porridge. Yet, when you go looking for what you had, it will be gone.

One must pass through this world with eyes open. It does no good to hide from evil: it will find you.

From great confusions, great clarities.

From great ignorance, deep knowledge.

From great clarity, great confusion.

From deep knowledge, great ignorance.

I’m still working on my Money piece, after which I will rewrite my Social Security piece (which I have decided is incoherent because it got me distracted by money), but here is my core conclusion:

Capitalism and Inflation are polar opposites. From this it follows that Capitalism and fiat money are polar opposites, and from that that the Federal Reserve is anti-capitalist. To the extent that economic freedom is both a prerequisite for and sign of political freedom, and to the extent economic freedom depends upon free markets of good, the Federal Reserve is therefore also anti-liberty.

Where Capitalism is the best system for the production of material goods ever developed, inflation is nothing more nor less than the production of money. No one wants money: they want what money will buy. Thus, the production of money is completely useless. We can, I think, posit that the creation of a fixed amount of money, once, is sufficient for any economy. What will vary thereafter is not the amount of money, but what that money will buy.

Here is my train of thought: posit a dollar bill on one side of the table, and a teacup on the other. The dollar represents all the money in existence, and the teacup all the physical wealth in existence. If I add a dollar through fiat money, I have created purchasing power for myself–I now own half the teacup–and diluted by half the purchasing power of the person who had the other dollar. This is what inflation does.

The countervailing operation is starting with the same dollar and teacup, and adding another teacup, so that with the same dollar I can now buy more. What one would expect with all the productivity gains in the last 100 years is that we could work less and own more. If our money had not been diluted through inflation (which remember equals wealth transfer) we COULD be working 20 hours a week and paying our way. As it is, we owe our souls to the company store.

To be clear, the value of money cannot go down unless there is competition for it, and competition can ONLY be added if more money is added. We expect competition to lower the price of goods and services, but fail to realize that the same thing happens with money. Since the money created by our Central Bank cost nothing, however, and since it is now worth something, that is a wealth transfer. With no fiat money, there would be no inflation, as I understand the issue. Added inventories, and added salaries will not. You can’t add to a salary without added money. What happens in conditions of stable money is production inflates, which is the primary mechanism of shared, general wealth. This is the POINT of Capitalism, which presumes Capital is in fact real money.

Thus we have three potential conditions: inventories inflate while money remains constant; money inflates while inventories remain constant; or both inflate, and people fail to see the trick, since goods and services are in fact increasing while the money supply likewise increases.

As a matter of record, in my understanding, prices did in fact drop in the 19th Century, such that what cost $1 in 1800 cost something like 50 cents in 1900. This is what you would expect with a stable currency.

Once the Federal Reserve–which enabled Big Money and Big Government–came into existence, the trend reversed, such that it would take $20 today to buy what cost $1 then. Imagine you could take the money you make today, have it be worth what it is today, and simply multiply it by 20. Unless I have badly misunderstood something, that is the real wealth you would possess. All of us could live well on what we make, and wouldn’t hesitate to share charitably.

The Central Bank of the United States made this impossible–again, unless I have badly misunderstood something.

Clearly, we need to abolish the Fed, but we need something to take its place. I am still working on that, but provisionally like my idea of 50 State currencies backed by gold. How to hold it–we don’t want State-run central banks either–is what I am trying to figure out.

Many of the more literate people out there will be familiar with the expostulation by a Buddhist monk–I’m pretty sure it was Thich Nhat Han (sp?)–to the effect of “when you do the dishes, do the dishes”. I’ve tried it, and couldn’t figure out what on earth he was talking about.

Here is a similar–perhaps the same, and I am just being retarded–idea: treat all tasks you do with affection. Do not force them. Do not resent them. Allow yourself to feel pleasure at all times and places. Normally, we have things we like to do, and things we don’t like to do. We transition from a state of contentment to a state of resentment, but this is not necessary.

It seems to me–on a superficial reading, not even being familiar with the actual Sanskrit word for mindfulness–that being aware, solely, is empty in a bad way. Moths are aware, and don’t think many thoughts. You have to consciously be looking for some desired state, and mindfulness is simply taking notice when you are drifting towards or away from that state.

I won’t go into all the fallacies that attend this topic normally, so much as point out how it COULD work. Consider the story of Joseph from the Bible, and the Pharoah’s dreams. As it happened, he was being told to set aside from his surplus crops enough food to tide them over for 7 bad years. They had 7 good years, then 7 bad years.

If we had a real Federal RESERVE system–which saved money from tax receipts, in a condition of actually having excess tax receipts, and no net debt–that money, which would be “real” money, could be put back into circulation when the economy slowed down. It could be gradually taken out again when things improved. This would work.

A further, rather radical idea I had was returning to State-issued currency. What if we had 50 different currencies in the United States? Would it impede the movement of money? Yes. What it would tend to do is make businesses operate more locally, and discourage massive transnational corporations. What I want is more diversity. I want less sameness. I want every State to have their own identity.

And frankly, I think we would all be happier if we moved around less, and settled into something approaching a complacent parochialism. As it is, we don’t know who we are. We move here, there, everywhere. And everywhere we go, we see the same damn shops, same construction, in many cases. You don’t know if you are in Boise or Dallas, depending on the street.

We need a massive transfer back to localism. It has been the case throughout our history that many currencies were issued. We forget this, but at one time, if memory serves, we had some 30,000 currencies. Banks would issue their own money. That, obviously, is too much, but if we had each State issue–once–their own money, and backed it with gold–with gold obviously being the means by which to move it around the country–I think some good might come of it.

If efficiency is the sole good, then a time may come when human beings are superfluous. Efficiency for WHAT? This is the question. We don’t want things: we want what things provide, such as comfort and time.

Why don’t we do a better job of thinking these things through? Personally, I blame the 24/7 media, which is slowly making brain dead zombies of us all.

Let us consider what Capitalism is. It is the accumulation, through time and effort, of the buying power to invest in something that makes something, say a factory. Since we can’t eat money, the part of Capitalism that is actually USEFUL to us is that part that makes things: boats, lettuce, software, music.

A fundamental principle of true Capitalism is competition. Now, in material objects, innovation is always possible, and necessary if you hope to continue to succeed. You use better tractors and fertilizers in food production, or transport it more efficiently. You write software programs no one has seen. You write a new song. You figure out how to make better boats cheaper.

Innovation in money is not possible. It is what it is. The path forward for money lenders then–and I am not here talking about your local bank, which serves a needed purpose, but rather the Federal Reserve, which prints money and loans it to banks who loan it to your neighborhood bank–is to develop a money trust, or Mercantilist relationship with the Federal Government: an anti-competitive relationship.

Let us posit one dollar on the table, with one teacup. This is its present day purchasing power. Let us further posit that the amount of money in circulation at any one time is completely arbitrary. We need enough physical “bits” to prices things precisely, but nothing more. Let us say that our dollar stands in for all real money in circulation, that can be cut into as many bits as needed. This is day one.

Day two, a second dollar bill is placed next to ours, making the teacup–the SAME teacup–cost 2 dollars. What happened? We now have half the purchasing power with the same dollar. What happened was the Fed printed money, and it trickled down the food chain. The people who got that money first, now own part of your teacup. Wealth has been transferred.

We know that in conditions of innovation, goods should be getting cheaper. You shoudl be able to buy two teacups for the same amount of money. The reason this doesn’t happen is that while we are innovating, our wealth is being diluted by injected money. Since 1913, when the Federal Reserve was created, we have seen 3% annual inflation, which compounded amounts to nearly 2000% inflation.

Clearly related are the facts that our national savings–what the Fed terms M2–have diminished to nearly nothing; in point of fact, almost all of us are net debtors. This is because a combination of inflation and cheap credit has caused us to view borrowing as smarter than saving.

Consider, though, our manufacturing: where has it gone? Much of it has left. Why? This is no doubt something with many explanations, but for me one stands out: if you can make money without making anything, why wouldn’t you? Is our economy not largely one of massive financial institutions, with trillions of dollars between them?

The essence of the idea of the gold standard is that there is a finite amount of money. Gold can be mined, yes, so it can be added to the money supply, but not easily. The intent is to put limits on how much money can be in circulation at any one time.

I may be mistaken, but it appears to me for now–and I will continue thinking and studying–that the reason we work so hard and get so little is very simply that we have given much of our real money over to Wall Street and the Federal Government.

On that last point, consider how many people the Federal Government employs. Consider all the buildings and land they own. Consider the pensions people get, and health benefits. ALL of this–ALL OF THIS–comes out of the private sector in the form of taxes and inflation. The government cannot provide you ANYTHING, except the rule of law and defense of the borders, that you could not better get on your own. This applies particularly to the poor, since every job in the public sector is a job taken from the private sector, with interest.

We need to get our money back. We need to abolish the Fed, and return to the gold standard. I will put a few more ideas in the following post.

It seem to me this word needs to be resurrected, as a term for the collusion of government and private enterprise. True Capitalism is free. No companies get unique rights as a result of their relationship with the means of government. The government exists, in my view, to PROTECT against the formation of cartels, and to enforce contracts, and provide physical security.

We use these terms in politics often (certainly I use “the Left” often, since I reserve the word liberal for those who value liberty). A bit of a comment is warranted on these words.

Historically, it comes from France, during the French Revolution. In the great Assembly Hall, where the self appointed delegates of “the people” met, various factions sat in physically different parts of the room. Since they were revolutionaries, all, by mere fact of being there, it can I think be safely assumed there were no PUBLIC absolute monarchists there, although presumably there were some private ones.

Rather, the right consisted in those who saw some value in tradition, who generally did not want to kill the King, and who favored gradualism in the process of political change. They wanted reasoned debate, moderation, and a certain skepticism towards those who wanted to radically alter the social landscape.

Patently, the system as it had existed in Louis XVI’s (I think that’s right) was corrupt. Broadly speaking, government was run by an oligarchy, and Old Boy’s Club. The King, for example, could offer plum government contracts for no bid to favorites. He could impose legislation which was not subject to veto by anyone. He did have restraints, though: as nominal defender of the Faith, he had to keep himself in the good graces of the Church. As an aristocrat, he needed to keep that class more or less satisfied with the status quo, lest they launch some sort of coup.

The decisions made by this group affected all the people, yet the people had no real say in them. It was a closed system.

The “rightists”, very simply, wanted to alter this. They wanted to put curbs on the King’s power. They wanted an Assembly to counterbalance the King, and force him to consider the public will in his decisions. They were, on my reading, the voice of common sense.

The leftists, in contrast, wanted not just a revolution politically, but in morals. They wanted to overthrow the entirety of the Catholic tradition. They wanted to build a utopia based on the ideals of liberty, brotherhood, and equality. On paper, these don’t sound so bad. Yet, the methods they chose were murder and political terrorism. That this was irrational was obscured by theorists among them who developed systems of wordplay that defended the indefensible. On the most basic level, how is the judicial murder of political opponents consistent with brotherhood? How is a de facto absolutist speech and behavioral code consistent with liberty? And if the Assembly has NO curbs on its powers–but not everyone can join–how is that equality?

Historically, look at the word right. You can be right, as in correct. We speak of human rights, as in claims to certain basic protections. And with respect to the left, consider the word sinister. It is related to sinistral, which means “left”. Or gauche/gaucherie, as in socially clumsy? In certain mystical traditions you have the normal path, and the “left handed” path.

As I see it, what we might term the mythical symbolism here is correct. The left, in France, and since, has been a symbol of evil: of the rejection of moral norms, political violence, and the imposition of wanton and unchecked power.